This site exists because I want you to get out there, with whatever camera you have,
and take much better photographs than I do. I hope you find something of value
in my photography or my writing that will help you do that. :)

New things!

Friday, 17th April, 2020: A toy!

If you're using Internet Explorer, this might not work for you.
Let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Friday, 21st September, 2018: UPGRADES

Hey, only a minor and boring technical update here, but hopefully one that makes everyone's lives a bit nicer:
I've moved my site onto a more powerful (and more expensive) server.
A side-effect of the move is that this site uses HTTPS, which makes everyone a bit safer.
A handy side-effect of that is that this site now supports HTTP/2 for the 80-ish percent of browsers that know how to speak it, which makes it even faster!

(From the UK, I'm measuring 68 milliseconds for my latest article to become readable,
and a mere 0.8 seconds till all the images have loaded. This is awesome!)

I don't expect anything to have been lost in the transition, but if you spot anything weird going on around the site let me know. Thank you <3

Sunday, 2nd September, 2018

And another new article: the original Fujifilm X100.
I loved this camera very much, I wanted to love it forever, and sold it out of frustration
with its slow operation.

Yep, it takes forever for me to write new articles; I need to use something for at
least a few months before I am sure I've found all the stuff that might annoy
me about a camera or lens. In the case of the X100, I wanted to write with a clear
head long after I ragequit it, and in the case of the lens I've used it for so long that
I am on my second 18-200mm!

Sunday, 29th January, 2017

At last: the
ancient 8 fps
pro SLR deathmatch! Nikon D2Hs vs Canon EOS 1D Mark II!
I spend at least a few months with any of my
cameras before writing about them, so these things tend
to be a while in the making.

Tuesday, 10th May, 2016

My site has always been a negative-profit operation, run out of my wallet
for the benefit of photographers and (especially!) people who want to get into
photography. I fully intend that it will stay that way, forever.

This site exists because I like helping and entertaining people, which
means I can improve my site in ways that might make life a bit harder for me
but will make your visits a little better. As such, I made a couple of little
changes:

My site no longer loads Google Analytics or any external tracking
scripts, which will make my site load a little bit faster and means
you are no longer being tracked by third parties. I used to love being able
to see who was linking to me, but
Analytics became increasingly useless due to spammers, so I removed it.
The spammers accidentally did something for the common good!

This site no longer loads any
fonts from Google.
My site looks as good/bad in Georgia (or if you don't have that, your
operating system's standard serif font) as it does in anything else, so who
cares?

Enjoy your even-faster, not-being-tracked-by-Google
lewiscollard.com!

Oh, and photography? I added thousands of new photographs to
Horsepower the other weekend.

Coming up next: the Fuji X100.
Plus, the Canon EOS 1D Mark II!

Yeah baby, there's going to be another
bargain SLR deathmatch,
this time with mid-2000s, 8-frames-per-second professional SLRs!

Saturday, 16th March, 2016

Thursday, 17th September, 2015

I fully support the
Death to Bullshit campaign - I love
giving people a little ad-free, nagging-free oasis, and the
fan mail tells me a lot of people
appreciate it, too. (I love my readers who write in; they're invariably
cool and interesting people. Even the occasional hate mails are
almost intelligent and logical!)

The guy who cleaned my sensor that I promoted a while back
(read about him a bit further down this page)
seems to have disappeared, so I went to see
Image Evolve
in Ipswich to clean my sensor. They did a fantastic job, at a very good price
(£30!), so thanks! Go see them if you're anywhere near Ipswich!

Here's what I would like to do, though. If you or your company runs an
independent sensor cleaning service in the United Kingdom, I will promote you for
free on my website. I am especially interested in people that will do this
outside of London.
If I get at least ten of you, I'll put together a page on my site to promote you, and
hey, if you're within a reasonable travelling distance of King's Lynn I might even use
you every couple of months. Email me.

Friday, 20th February, 2015

Friday, 23rd January, 2015

This was overdue:
a big update to my article on the
Nikon D2Hs. More photos and more
words! It's still a fantastic camera that gets fantastic results, without
any qualifiers like "for a ten-year-old digital SLR".

Saturday, 13th December, 2014

Announcing: Horsepower,
a motorsports gallery by me. If you wondered what I've been doing
photography-wise since April, here it is!

Sunday, 6th April, 2014

Hey, I'm now
on Tumblr where
I will be posting stuff that doesn't go into my
gallery, mostly drift racing
stuff.

I've also been
on
Google+ for a while (which is much of the same
stuff). Come say hi!

Sunday, 23rd March, 2014

New article: the
Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8
AF-D. A bargain as far as f/2.8 telephotos go, but for DX
cameras with subjects that stay still, use the
55-200mm VR at a seventh
of the price bought new.

Friday, 7th March, 2014

Time for a couple of recommendations.

So, I made the mistake of changing lenses while shooting drift racing,
and my Nikon D2Hs's sensor got pretty
filthy. What I learned, is that if you live any substantial distance
north of London, it is very, very hard to find a place
that will clean your digital SLR's sensor. After a lot of digging,
for someone that works a sensible distance from me (I know what couriers
are like, so I refuse to post it), I found a guy that does.

Please check out The
Sensor Clean Service (link dead as of 2015-07-03). He is in
Birmingham, and he did a beautiful
job of cleaning my sensor. He's not especially expensive, either; it's
£35 regardless of the size of your sensor. Better yet,
he "took the liberty" (in his words) of cleaning months worth
of drift racing dust off my camera. The D2Hs came back
so clean on the outside that I had to fight back tears when I
saw it!

I am paid nothing to say this, and won't be paid a penny if you
get your sensor cleaned by him; I paid full price. This is a
sincere recommendation from
one photographer to the rest of you.

My second recommendation is for you all to check out
Esther Turner. I saw
her busking in Birmingham after I picked up my camera
and she has a lovely voice.

Hey, can you believe that this was shot with the ancient
D2Hs at ISO
1400? Yup, it still looks
fantastic at any
non-pushed ISO!

Friday, 25th October, 2013

Friday 13th September, 2013; or, DON'T BURN OUT KIDS, IT'S NOT GOOD FOR YOU

Oh hello. I'm back!

The weird rant I had about quitting, well, sorry about that (and
thanks to the people who registered their concern with me).
As Vinay Gupta told me:
If you burn out, just do something else until you feel better.
That's what I did! I took a few weeks away from it,
I'm shooting again, and if you use the number-of-shots-taken
metric I've shot more in the last week than I did in the whole
year up until my burn-out. Which is nice!

Also, I've been shooting this:

Stay tuned!

(Yeah, the weird rant has gone. Sorry about that.
The original is out there
if you want it badly enough. The offer to download and copy everything here
remains and is irrevocable.)

Thursday, 1st August, 2013

You can now download everything I've written or taken
for free thanks to archive.org:

Download
all of my site as a tar.gz file, This includes all my articles
and all of the medium-resolution versions of images as displayed
in my gallery. It should also have all links fixed so that they
will point to your local copy.

As my non-copyright notice says: Anyone caught
copying any of my photographs or text will be considered a mighty
good friend of mine. Which is to say, please
go ahead and copy all my stuff, and use it in any way you see
fit. No, you don't have to ask permission to paste one of my
articles into your blog, set one of my pictures as your wallpaper,
use a photo in your school report, or do anything else with
any of my stuff. I'd love to hear about any great things you do
with my pictures, though.

Friday, 15th March, 2013

Monday, 4th March, 2013

New article: the
Pentacon 50mm f/1.8.
I've been using it on-and-off for half a decade, so this
is a little overdue!

I'm experimenting with the star-ratings at the top of that one.
The downside of the fact that I ramble too much is that
if you're just skimming what I read, it's hard to tell what I
actually think about something without reading me carefully.
I figured I could either 1) not be so boring, or 2) put a brief
summary at the top for people who are in a rush. I did #2!

Meanwhile, I'm slowly (very slowly) upgrading the pictures on
my various review pages to 800-pixels-wide, up from 500 when I
first started doing this site. 500 just isn't big enough for
modern screens. It's a slow process because sometimes I have
to track down the original photographs on my drive, when they're
not photographs from my gallery. I keep all
the originals, of course, but with tens of thousands of them
they're often not easy to find.

Sunday, 17th February, 2013: Prettier, Pumps, Posterous

New look: I've refreshed the look of this site a
little (I'm still sticking with minimalism here). Among other
things, it should look much better on mobile devices.
Let me
know if anything looks really weird in your browser. (But clear your cache
and refresh first!)

Posterous is
closing,
so I've gotta move what little of value I had on my old Posterous
blog to here. You'll probably get at least one article out of that
shortly. But there's something bigger at work here:

If you care about something, host it on
a domain you own and hosting you pay for.

I'm not going to join in with the chorus of "ha ha you get what
you pay for and you should have made geographically redundant
backups of all your stuff on at least two different kinds of
physical media and oh God why is Lewis punching me in the face"
nerd-outs. Nope, I'd only do that if websites weren't
implicitly urging you to trust them with all of your
stuff. But they do. Show me where Fotopic
(wow, they suck) said "we're so incompetent that
we literally can't build a business model around people giving
us money, so don't let us be your only copy!". Show me
where Posterous said "host your stuff with us - we're here
at least until we're acquired by another company for
our talent!". Then you would have a point.
Until then, they are not the good guys.

I'm glad I figured all of this out a while back, long
before the acquisition and consequent death of Posterous.
The senseless murdering of Geocities
(on which I did not have a site) brought that home to me.
Jason
Scott, who downloaded Geocities, was a big factor in that as well. (Warning:
you can easily get lost in his archives over there. He's
a great writer; he's controversial, passionate, and could
easily have a career in teaching the effective and hilarious use of
profanity if digital archiving didn't work out. You'd
be right to see some of his style in my own; it's not
because he's ever read me. He and his merry band
are
downloading
Posterous, by the way.)

Here's the thing: The degree to which a company gives
a damn about you is determined by whether
1) you are giving them money and
2) you can quickly
and easily move all your stuff somewhere else.
But more than that, you are a free person, in the sense of not being
at the mercy of others, to the same degree as the latter
is true.

See, eventually a site is either going to make money,
get acquired (like Posterous), or go bust. And if it's a choice between "not
punching users" and "making money", you are going to
get punched at some point. Like when photographers
expended lots of time and effort to build up substantial followings on Facebook, and then
Facebook decided that if they wanted their followers to see
updates they had explicitly signed up for, that
the photographers would have to pay. That was
awesome. And by "that was awesome" I mean "don't
be that guy".

This, by the way, is why my site is actually a bunch of
static HTML files. See, I like my web host
plenty, and I don't see them going away any time soon. But
if they did decide that "punching users" was
a good addition to their business model of "give people
disk space and bandwidth in exchange for money", I am literally a card payment and an
rsync command
away from hosting all of this with someone else. Having to
dump and restore databases and deal with subtle
hosting incompatibilities would make that job a lot harder.
I'd still switch given enough punches,
but if it wasn't convenient for me to host
my site somewhere else, that threshold would be a lot,
lot more punchy.

One more thing: don't be an early adopter. You'll be counting on
that platform being the one that wins. The odds are usually
against you by definition. Posterous ended up as Tumblr food,
but remember that the opposite outcome was
entirely
as plausible in 2008
or 2009.

Monday, 31st December, 2012

Almost the end of the year, so I'd like to float a few things about
the direction of this site for next year.

I shall be updating much more, if not more often.
2012 has been a crazy, crazy year for me. I'm not even sorry
about that, but one of the casualties of has been my site, which I don't
update as often as people would like. I'll work on that.

I won't be covering much digital stuff, mostly
because everywhere else does this much better than me, even when it
comes to really old stuff that nobody cares about, like the
D1.
I've got a couple more digital pieces mostly written up, which will
be here soon, but really, anything I write about digital won't
add much to the discussion.

(Although, inexplicably, my
piece on
the Samsung Galaxy S II camera phone is by a very large margin
the most popular thing on my site. If I get my hands on an S III
I'll let you know. I'd at least like to see if they've fixed the
white balance problem.)

There will be a lot more film stuff. Film still
isn't dead! But there is a shortage of objective reviews of
film camera lenses. By "film camera lenses", I mean lenses for
camera systems that died off before the end of the 35mm era and thus never
made it onto digital cameras. I'm thinking Canon FD and M42
screw-mount, both of which I have by the boatload.

Have a prosperous 2013!

Thursday, 8th November, 2012

Oh hi. I met Tashya, who is both absurdly photogenic and a very
nice person. Do go
follow her on Twitter.

Tuesday, 25th September, 2012

I've seen some real-world samples from the Lytro. The guys at
Lytro must be fans of my website, because all the pictures I've
seen seem to have been carefully picked to prove all my scepticism
correct. (Just kidding, they actually blocked
me on Twitter.
Ha!)

Monday, 10th September, 2012

I'm
interviewed by Viktor Fejes! I'm always surprised when people
take me seriously enough to ask for my opinions, especially real
photographers like Viktor. But there it is!

Dalibor Jankov sent me some shots from one of his cameras and the
behaviour he had right before his sensor died was exactly like the
behaviour I have been getting from my D1, including brief periods of
working normally. So yup, it looks like my D1's sensor really is
on the way out. Bummer.

Update: An alternative explanation comes from
reader Gerhard Reininger, who suspects a battery problem.
It's a possibility; I didn't even think to check the voltage coming from
the battery when it happened, and the PowerSmart
battery is nearly new. We'll see; I put plenty of miles on my cameras
so if it's going to happen again it'll be quite soon. If it does turn out
to be the battery that'll give me the motivation to build a 18650-celled
pack for it.

Thanks guys!

Sunday, 9th September, 2012: The plot thickens, or, a meta-"WTF"

Here's what my D1 was doing by the end of yesterday:

Well. I fired up my D1 this morning to see what
would happen. The first shot I took looked a little bit like the
shot above, except the black-with-fuzzy-purple-stripe only covered
about a quarter of the image, at the top, and the rest was
normal. The next shot I took did not have this; it looked just fine.
And now, it's back to
normal:

I initially suspected overheating (this started on a hot day, and I'm
sure it gets real toasty in a black, weather-sealed camera in
hot weather), but I've shot it for longer on much hotter days than yesterday.
Reader Dalibor Jankov wrote in shortly before this update and he thinks
that sensor is dead. He's at least partly right (if it's not dead,
it's definitely smelling funny). I'm just at a loss to explain why it
would do this one day and not the next.

Saturday, 8th September, 2012: A Nikon D1 "WTF"

It gets weirder if you look at it
full-size. I'm
stumped; did I just kill another Nikon?

I'd be grateful for any clues as to what happened. Here's some stuff
you might need to know:

There are no weird settings. I've done a two-button
reset to ensure this.

It happens with all my CF cards. It's not a card
problem; all these cards work just fine in other cameras.

It happens regardless of raw or JPEG settings. The
smearing behaviour also happens in B&W JPEGs, too.

The battery is fine. I'll check the voltage to
make sure, but it was fully charged, and was working just great yesterday
too.

The problem came on progressively. It
started out with a subtle red band towards the right, which I didn't even
notice on my LCD as I shot, and progressively got worse until it looked
like this. (It's currently rendering totally illegible pictures
worse than this one.)

The only thing that has changed since yesterday (when it was working)
was me blowing some dust off the sensor with a little blower bulb. I'm
super-careful to not touch the sensor, of course, but now I'm worrying
that doing this could have damaged the sensor since that's the
only thing that changed since having a working camera
yesterday.

Any clues, my lovely readers?

Wednesday, 5th September, 2012

Hey, since I'm shooting one old crappy digital camera, I figured now would
be a good time to make it two. Behold, the triumphant (but temporary)
return of the Canon EOS D30!

Tuesday, 4th September, 2012

What amazes me about shooting the beyond-ancient
D1 is how little I miss
compared to newer, far far better cameras, and how I've gotten used to
its technical limitations. So it has awful colour. So does a Leica
M9; shoot the damn thing in raw and quit whining. It has horrendous
problems with highlights. So fix your lighting. The D-TTL flash
system sucks. Good, a free opportunity: learn to use a manual flash gun.
It takes roughly six days to write an NEF file to the card. Then
shoot carefully. Of course I'm going to use other cameras, but
I'll be a better photographer for having used the D1.

Sunday, 2nd September, 2012

Thursday, 30th August, 2012

Sunday, 26th August, 2012

New article: the Nikon D1, Nikon's
most important camera of the 1990s.

Saturday, 25th August, 2012

Oh hello!

Taken with the 2.7 megapixel Nikon D1 from 1999.

My D1 article is still in the works; I'm mostly waiting for
this bug in
Darktable to be fixed. Darktable
is great, but it seems to have issues
dealing with the embedded thumbnails in the D1's NEFs. (A full review
of that is coming too; I'd rather that bug get fixed first so
I have something good to say on that count.)

In the meantime, my buddy Viktor Fejes now has a
real website. You should
probably go check him out. (It's mostly in Hungarian, but who cares, the
photographs are not.)

Sunday, 29th July, 2012

Thursday, 26th July, 2012

You could have missed this; a few weeks back I added a few pictures of
motorsports onto my page about the
Nissin 360 TW flash gun. It's not a
collector's toy like the rest of my old junk; it's an unbelievably
powerful flash that you can buy for less than £20 today. If you
have a small budget and know how to use a manual flash, it's as good
as bargains get!

Saturday, 7th July, 2012

And yes, I am nuts enough to try and use this for actual photography.
Stay tuned!

(Thanks to Sam Lee for sending me this!)

Friday, 6th July, 2012

I'm late to the party here, but if you want to see a head-to-head comparison of 2001's
Canon EOS D30 (less than £100 used)
versus an EOS 1D Mark IV (£3,500), have a look at
this
post by David Jackson. At sensible enlargements and low
ISOs there is no clear winner!

Of course newer is better, but Jackson shows it's not that
much better in the hands of a skilled photographer like him (rather
than a guy with a website like me), so if you have less than £100
to spend on a camera then don't let anyone deter you from
picking one up. Haters gonna hate.

On the subject of old crappy cameras: Stay tuned,
things are about to get really fun.

Tuesday, 3rd July, 2012

Rest in peace, Sherman.

1998-2012

Saturday, 23rd June, 2012

These are actually old shots, reprocessed, with which I was testing
Darktable. It works on Linux and
it's so good that it might have finally converted me to shooting raw for
everything important. Note that the latter shot was taken with a
Canon EOS D30 (not even a
30D) and the former was with my dead
D2H; it really does work wonderfully,
even with files from very old and crappy cameras. Review coming once I
do some serious stuff with it, but it definitely has my seal of
approval.

Thursday, 24th May, 2012

My Praktica screw problem is now resolved;
Gary White sent me several Praktica bodies, among other things,
one of which will be a screw donor. Thanks, Gary!

Monday, 21st May, 2012

Lytro quietly downgraded their specifications for their
gimmick camera: while $399
used to get you 16gb of storage and $499 would get you 32gb, it's
now 8gb and 16gb. You now pay $100 for 8gb of solid state storage,
rather than 16!

Saturday, 12th May, 2012

Wednesday, 18th April, 2012

Monday, 16th April, 2012: A plea

SCREW PROBLEM SOLVED.
Gary White was kind enough to send me an assortment of Praktica
bodies, one of which is not functional and contains a replacement
screw for my Praktica MTL3.
A huge thanks to Gary. My original plea for help was below.

The friend I lent it to in the United States had problems with light leaking
into it since she got it. Strange. I figured it might have suffered some
terrible damage during shipping. She sent it back to me, and it turns out
that a baseplate screw either fell out or was removed, somewhere between
me and aforementioned friend.

So here's the problem: I need one of these screws.
I'm hesitant to kill a working or could-work-with-some-TLC Praktica in order
to get one. Unfortunately, the screw in question does not seem to match any
metric or BA thread size. I've measured it with a digital vernier gauge and
the diameter of the thread is 1.34mm (metric sizes are either
1.2 or 1.4mm, 12BA is 1.3mm). The head is a dome head measuring
3.15mm across, and the screw is 3.44mm long overall (about 3mm of which is
the actual thread -- this was much harder to measure).

Is this some other thread system, or is 0.04mm within the manufacturing
tolerances of a 12BA screw? I'm hoping there are some model engineers or
other smart people out there who can help me with this. If you know one, pass
it on!

By the way, since the MTL3 is back, I figured you should all have a
human-readable howto on using it because the manual is awful. I wrote that
and it's over
here
on wikiHow. You can spot the missing screw if you look hard enough!

Saturday, 24th March, 2012

Friday, 23rd March, 2012

Hello folks, it's been a while again. Don't worry, it's not
about to turn into a website that apologises for not updating
enough. Those of you that don't know me all that well (and honestly, I'm
surprised at how many hits my silly website gets, so I'm sure
that the vast majority of you don't!) might not
know that
I actually get up to a bunch of things in other places.
Here's some things I've been up to:

I've been a contributor on the
Wikimedia
Commons for about seven years now. It's a repository of freely-reusable
media files, which is a fancy way of saying you can do absolutely
anything with the stuff I upload over there. I generally use this for
my "subject"-ish stuff, which is pretty average and boring to my
eye, but might be useful to someone somewhere. You can see the
latest files I've added
here.
I probably post more photographs there than I do on my own site.

The unfortunate part of being there so long, by the way, is that you get
to see my learning process the ugly way over the last few
years. I have a gallery
here if you want to see nearly everything all at once.

I spent a day seeing the
Norfolk Drift Team
on the 10th of March. If you're in the King's Lynn area, I can't
recommend it highly enough; entry is free and there's lots
of great cars and friendly folks.
There's nothing like actually doing something to give you a newfound
admiration for the people who do it well. In this case, for me, it
was motorsport photography. Yup, it's much harder than it looks!
I took about 1300 photographs and 7 of them were just about good
enough that I could rescue them with some post-processing. I'll have
to track down Ammo
next time I'm there and get some pointers.

In any case,
some of the average photographs I took are over at the Wikimedia
Commons, in this
category (as I write this, all but two are ones I took, and all
the ones with cars in them), which means you are free to use them
for any purpose. I've also learned a lot about my
ancient D2H in the process, and of
course that's going to end up with a massive expansion of that article.
I'll be seeing the Drift Team next month, too, so come say hi!

Wednesday, 7th March, 2012

I've been away in the wilderness for a bit (which is to say, working up
in Lincolnshire), but while I was there, I received a lovely fan mail
which apologised for emailing me with questions. This has
happened before, too. Hey guys, I love receiving fan mail, that's why
I have my email address at the bottom of every page on my site, so
don't apologise. Unlike most photography websites, mine has
no ads and so this actually costs me money to run. I'd keep doing this
if I didn't get nice mail from my readers nearly every day, but it sure
does motivate me.

Friday 24th February, 2012

In the gallery: Maria. Another one on the
instructional/self-critical side.

Wednesday 22nd February, 2012

Wait, did you think this site was still about my photography and cameras
and not trains? Don't worry, I finally finished off the roll of expired-in-2005
Agfa Optima in my Kiev 88. I'll get it
back in a few days!

Monday 24th October, 2011

Thursday 20th October, 2011

Good news: everything in the gallery is now
available in much higher resolution (50% bigger in some cases). Better news:
I've done that while keeping the file sizes reasonable, so it should still
load quickly. Hooray!